5 _(content warning sexism)_
6 _(content warning transphobia)_
7 _(content warning too much information about weird fetishes)_
8 _(content warning WTF did I just read)_
10 (December 2020, [TODO] words)
13 (You can also think of this as psychological context-setting for my philosophy-of-language Sequence's forthcoming two-post conclusion, "Unnatural Categories Are Optimized for Deception" and "Motivation and Political Context for my Philosophy-of-Language Agenda")
19 WTF transphobic garbage did I just read?? Too bad Yudkowsky can't control how creepy randos on the internet interpret his work ...
25 Hi SneerClub! I noticed that you've enjoyed some of my [previous](https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/fw9cng/the_lgbt_activist_machinery_instead_adapted/) [work](https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/61t94y/rationalist_tries_justifying_their_transphobia_by/), so I thought I would go ahead and proactively share this one with you, because (I'm guessing) it probably checks a lot of the boxes for top sneerable content: it's got Yudkowsky hero-worship, _and_ sexism (as many of you would define that), _and_ transphobia (as many of you would define that), _and_ weird sex stuff!
27 (From _my_ perspective, I'm pouring my heart out about the most important thing in my life, but if someone else with a different perspective would only sneer, then I can only hope to have been—if only for a moment, as part of a subroutine in the optimal sneer computation—_understood_. And for that moment, I am grateful.)
31 B.F. on JKR (https://www.facebook.com/duncan.sabien/posts/3883966591638029?comment_id=3884054068295948&reply_comment_id=3884243454943676):
32 > I am very glad that I don't have anyone with opinions similar to hers in my immediate vicinity, because I am pretty sure that if I did, my brain would constantly be running a scared loop in any social interactions with them. [...] I think it's important that people can write essays that are as far outside my personal Overton window as hers is outside it (because sometimes they're correct and I should update, even though I don't believe this is an instance of that)
39 * Superhappies empathic inference for not wanting to believe girls were different
40 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qCsxiojX7BSLuuBgQ/the-super-happy-people-3-8
41 * empathic inference: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NLMo5FZWFFq652MNe/sympathetic-minds
42 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Zkzzjg3h7hW5Z36hK/humans-in-funny-suits
43 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9fpWoXpNv83BAHJdc/the-comedy-of-behaviorism
45 * "The Opposite Sex" https://web.archive.org/web/20130216025508/http://lesswrong.com/lw/rp/the_opposite_sex/
46 * EY was right about "men need to think about themselves _as men_" (find cite)
47 * Vassar slapping me down
49 * Faster Than Science, Transgender Edition (prior draft)
50 * "I often wish some men/women would appreciate"
51 * study evidence that this is actually common
52 * AGPs dating each other is the analogue of "Failed Utopia 4-2"!!—the guys in "Conservative Men in Conservative Dresses" are doing better in some ways
53 > The vast majority of men are not what the vast majority of women would most prefer, or vice versa. I don’t know if anyone has ever actually done this study, but I bet that both gay and lesbian couples are happier on average with their relationship than heterosexual couples. (Googles… yep, looks like it.) <https://news.softpedia.com/news/Gay-and-Lesbian-Families-Are-Happier-than-Heterosexual-Ones-77094.shtml>
55 * finding things in the refrigerator
56 * https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xsyG7PkMekHud2DMK/of-gender-and-rationality
57 * make sure the late-onset/AGP terminology is introduced in a coherent order rather than being inserted willy-nilly
58 * the message length of my existence (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length)
59 [TODO: "expecting women to be defective men"]
60 * aren't all those transwomen going to be _embarrrassed_ after the Singularity, when telepathy tech makes everything obvious
61 * stress fracture vs. sprain: psychology is more complicated, but the basic moral holds
62 * "I don't care" "It sounds like you do care"
63 * pronouns do have truth conditions
64 * The text of this blog post is not something a woman could have written
65 * as a programmer, I have learned to fear dependencies
66 * wipe culturally defined values: https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/BkkwXtaTf5LvbA6HB/moral-error-and-moral-disagreement (this might have to go after Failed-Utopia #4-2)
68 * If I want to stay aligned with women, then figuring out how to do that depends on the facts about actual sex differences; if I want to do the value-exchange suggested in
70 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/r3NHPD3dLFNk9QE2Y/search-versus-design-1
71 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JBFHzfPkXHB2XfDGj/evolution-of-modularity
75 Outline for remaining Coda—
76 * you can doubt someone's theory without doubting their report-as-data
77 * what "as a first approximation" means in causal graphs
78 * people have a political incentive to deny, but I'm making a fact-claim
79 * I would have expected the "rationalists" to be interested in getting the right answer (quote the "20% of the ones with penises" Facebook post), but it doesn't look like that's happening
81 people colluding to maintain a thin layer of social constructions; lies to cis people
83 [sympathetic minds gay couples anecdote]
84 Anne Lawrence described autogynephiles as ["men who love women and want to become what they love."](/papers/lawrence-becoming_what_we_love.pdf) But it's worse than that. We're men who love what we _wish_ women were, and want to become _that_.
86 [I have seen the destiny of my neurotype, and am putting forth a convulsive effort to wrench it off its path. My weapon is clear writing.](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i8q4vXestDkGTFwsc/human-evil-and-muddled-thinking)
91 (This attempted nickname-change turned out to be a terrible idea for several reasons: first, my particular pair of real-life initials never really "felt like a name" even to me (as contrasted to something like "C.J.", which feels like a name because it has a _J_ in it); second, I found it incredibly psychologically stressful for some people to know me by one name, and people I knew before to know me by another, and I didn't have the guts to nag people in the latter group to switch for something that didn't feel like a name even to me; third, the "gender-neutral byline" rationale almost certainly didn't hold up in practice because my real first initial (not _M._; this blog is under a pen name) is a high-Scrabble-score letter that begins one high-frequency boy name (top 200 in the [1990 Census list](https://www.census.gov/topics/population/genealogy/data/1990_census/1990_census_namefiles.html)), and no high-frequency girl names (the most popular candidates trailing my ugly boy-name in frequency by an order of magnitude). But it was the _principle!_)
94 "different thing that I don't understand" /2019/Jan/interlude-xvi/
97 Be careful to phrase the early part as about _me_, and only point fingers at trans women in the coda
99 My ideological committment to psychological-sex-differences denialism made me uncomfortable when the topic of sex differences happened to come up on the blog—which wasn't particularly often, but in such a vast, sprawling body of work as the Sequences, it occasionally turned out to be relevant in a discussion of evolution or human values.
101 I ... need to write more about the phenomenology of this. I don't think the details are that important here? Maybe read the ["Man, I Feel Like a Woman" TV Tropes page](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ManIFeelLikeAWoman) and consider that the page wouldn't have so many entries if some male writers didn't have a reason to be _extremely interested_ in _that particular fantasy scenario_.
103 "It is said that parents do all the things they tell their children not to do, which is how they know not to do them." https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DwtYPRuCxpXTrzG9m/my-wild-and-reckless-youth
105 "don't ask me how I know this, and I won't tell you" https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/AeBfaMZt7e7ye38Hw/open-thread-november-1-15-2012#comment-ib37xYqDnJgxE285R
107 Men who _fantasize about_ being women, do not particularly rememble actual women?
109 ([Amanda Marcotte](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanda_Marcotte) once described one of my comments as "cute"! It ... was not a compliment.)
111 , like drugs and sex, it wasn't salient to me as something that actually happens in real life, rather than on television
113 (Where "girls" are the ones with a vagina, breasts, _&c._)
115 changing emotions/accent fantasies: https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/wAW4ENCSEHwYbrwtn/other-people-s-procedural-knowledge-gaps/comment/pheakgvLbFndXccXC
117 /2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/
119 [TODO: sentence about how "gender identity" was offensive to me, link to "A Beacon"]
121 https://web.archive.org/web/20200118114912/https://yudkowsky.net/obsolete/bookshelf.html
125 learned things in the wrong order
127 Anyway, I kind of spent the next ten years reading everything I could about sex and gender and transgender and feminism and evopsych and doing various things with my social presentation—sometimes things I regretted and reverted after a lot of pain—to try to seem not-masculine,
129 all the while assuming that my gender problems were clearly not the same thing as the gender problems of actual trans women,
131 because the standard narrative was that that's
133 up through 2016 I was grappling with these issues,
135 I'm weird, but I'm not _that_ weird.
137 about gender identity being discordant from sex assigned at birth,
139 which was clearly not what my thing was.
141 I thought, essentially, "Gee, it's too bad this beautiful word which so perfectly describes the beautiful feeling at the center of my life happened to be coined in the context of this controversial theory about the etiology of MtF transsexualism which is probably false because everyone says it's obviously false."
143 inference by analogy—even if not all trans women are exactly like me, at least a lot of them are going to be similar
145 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XYCEB9roxEBfgjfxs/the-scales-of-justice-the-notebook-of-rationality
146 writes down all the facts that aren't on anyone's side.
148 In the political world, "gay and trans"—the identity-modifiers "stack".
150 Etiologically, people who are "gay and trans" are ... straight.
153 not needing permission from another person
158 What makes it hard to think about is that humans don't really _know_ how our own minds work. Evolution endowed us with certain capacities for making sense of the world, in our own way, when making sense of the world increased fitness in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, but this mostly doesn't extend to making sense of the _mechanisms by which_ we can make sense of the world.
162 [stonewalling](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wqmmv6NraYv4Xoeyj/conversation-halters)
167 https://archive.is/7Wolo
168 > the massive correlation between exposure to Yudkowsky's writings and being a trans woman (can't bother to do the calculations but the connection is absurdly strong)
169 Namespace's point about the two EYs
171 link back to Murray review: can't oppress people on the basis of sex if sex _doesn't exist_
173 https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2020/10/24/is-autogynephilia-real-the-phenomenon-the-construct-the-theory/
175 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vjmw8tW6wZAtNJMKo/which-parts-are-me
177 If we _actually had_ the magical perfect sex change technology described in "Changing Emotions"—if it cost $200,000, I would take out a bank loan and _do it_, and live happily ever after.
181 people like me being incentivized to identify as part of a political pressure group that attempts to leverage claims of victimhood into claims on power
183 [fallacy of compression _ironed in to the culture_, that resists attempts to deconfuse]
185 [I know _exactly_ what's wrong with me]
187 [TODO: two-types as a first approximation]
189 [TODO: others like me, gender of the gaps]
191 [TODO: the last sequence was "Craft and the Community", which has aged by far the worst—part of the robot cult's "common interest of many causes" was getting everything right, including reformulating trans ideology to be sane, which should benefit everyone because of dark-side-epistemology—but that's not realistic]
193 [TODO: are we getting new recruits? A lot of the names I see are old]
195 Yudkowsky says trans rights!
197 This doesn't pass the smell test. This doesn't pass the _laugh_ test.
199 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jMTbQj9XB5ah2maup/similarity-clusters
200 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cFzC996D7Jjds3vS9/arguing-by-definition
202 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length
204 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9QxnfMYccz9QRgZ5z/the-costly-coordination-mechanism-of-common-knowledge
206 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/L22jhyY9ocXQNLqyE/science-as-curiosity-stopper
209 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MkKcnPdTZ3pQ9F5yC/cryonics-without-freezers-resurrection-possibilities-in-a
210 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hJPh8XyJ3fTK2hLFJ/three-dialogues-on-identity
212 "I'm not from around here; I'm from another dimension"
214 activity group selecting on T ...
216 But the angle between the line between me and my sister, and the line between me and my female analogue, is the [arctangent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse_trigonometric_functions) of the difference-between-same-sex-siblings and the difference-between-sexes, which is small if sex differences are a lot larger than same-sex sibling differences (with respect to whatever metric on personspace we're using).
218 [the direction of causality](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/07/concerns/)
219 http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/concerns-ii/
221 address GI->AGP direction
223 (The scintillating but ultimately untrue thought.)
226 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KmghfjH6RgXvoKruJ/hand-vs-fingers
228 I'm not objecting to your existence, I'm only objecting to the prerequisites to your existence
230 (See Tailcalled on "zooming in" on the typology to at least a four node graph.)
232 But once you stop taking the "gender identity"/"woman trapped in a man's body" story as _axiom_ and
234 It's possible to disagree with people's _theoretical account_ of their own psychology, without doubting the honesty of their self-report, in the sense that people are doing their best to translate the ineffable _qualia_ of their experience into words.
236 [throw a chair](/2019/Jan/use-it-or-lose-it/) and yell, "How dumb do you think we are?!"
238 The claim is not that the trans woman who describes her experience as an "internal sense of her own gender" is lying.
240 If someone claims to have an inter
242 https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2019/10/27/the-mathematical-consequences-of-a-toy-model-of-gender-transition/
244 You might ask, what do I mean by "as a first approximation"?
246 /2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/#a-thing-about-me
248 _You have to let me show you what you are_.
250 > The absolute inadequacy of every single institution in the civilization of magical Britain is what happened! You cannot comprehend it, boy! I cannot comprehend it! It has to be seen and even then it cannot be believed!
251 http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/108
253 > The realization blasted through Harry like a vast dam breaking, releasing out all its water, bursting through his mind in an irresistible flood that swept everything away.
254 > There is only one reality that generates all of the observations.
256 (http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/104)
258 It's not a gender identity; it's a sexual orientation that's surprisingly easy to misinterpret as a gender identity
260 The level above "Many-worlds is obviously correct, stop being stupid" is "Racial IQ differences are obviously real; stop being stupid"
262 https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/
264 my pseudobisexual moments (it's California in the year 2015)
266 our analogues would make a good couple in a nearby alternate universe where at least one of us is female. "Exactly one," he said. "It's California in the year 2015," I said.
271 Anyway, four years later, it turns out that this whole "rationality" subculture is completely fake. The thing that convinced me of this was not _even_ the late-onset-gender-dysphoria-in-males-is-not-an-intersex-condition thesis that I was originally trying to talk about. Humans are _really complicated_: no matter how "obvious" something in psychology or social science to me, I can't write someone off entirely simply for disagreeing, because the whole domain is so complex that I always have to acknowledge that, ultimately, I could just be wrong.
273 But in the _process_ of trying to _talk about_ this late-onset-gender-dysphoria-in-males-is-not-an-intersex-condition thesis, I noticed that my conversations kept getting _derailed_ on some variation of "The word _woman_ doesn't necessarily mean that." _That_ part of the debate, I knew I could win.
275 [dark side epistemology, what the math actually means in the real world from "Reply to Holden"]
277 (Picture me playing Hermione Granger in a post-Singularity [holonovel](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Holo-novel_program) adaptation of _Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality_ (Emma Watson having charged me [the standard licensing fee](/2019/Dec/comp/) to use a copy of her body for the occasion): "[We can do anything if we](https://www.hpmor.com/chapter/30) exert arbitrarily large amounts of [interpretive labor](https://acesounderglass.com/2015/06/09/interpretive-labor/)!")
279 This is the eye of the hurricane; this is the only way I can [protect](/2019/Jul/the-source-of-our-power/)
283 /2019/Aug/a-love-that-is-out-of-anyones-control/
284 /2017/Oct/a-leaf-in-the-crosswind/
287 It Might Be Cool https://xkcd.com/535/
289 even after taking into account that the phrase "once you know what to look for" is a 20-meter fire-truck-red flag for [confirmation bias](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rmAbiEKQDpDnZzcRf/positive-bias-look-into-the-dark).
292 If I sound angry, it's because I actually do feel a lot of anger, but I wish I knew how to more reliably convey its target. A trans woman I know thinks I'm suffering from false consciousness, that my pious appeals to Objectivity and Reason are [just a facade](https://sinceriously.fyi/false-faces/) concealing my collaboration with a cissexist social order via scapegoating instincts: "I'm one of the good compliant ones—not one of those weird bad trans people who will demand their rights! _They're_ the witches, not me; burn them, not me!"
294 I have [no grounds to fault her for not taking my self-report as unquestionable](/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/), but I still think she's reading me wrong.
295 [agree that scapegoating is real]
297 complicit with cissexism:
298 /2017/Mar/interlude-ii/
299 /2019/Feb/interlude-xviii/
301 I guess I feel pretty naïve now, but—I _actually believed our own propoganda_. I _actually thought_ we were doing something new and special of historical and possibly even _cosmological_ significance.
303 **Almost everything I do is at least one meta level up from any actual decisions.** I'm _not_ trying to tell other people how to live their lives, because _that would be crazy_. I am obviously _not smart enough_ to tell other people what they should do _and get the right answer_. True, I am skeptical of currently-popular _theories_ of how gender works and how gender dysphoria works,[^concepts] because I think they are _false_ in certain knowable aspects and that I have a more accurate view in certain knowable aspects. That is _not the same thing_ as telling people to detransition! Maybe lots _more_ people should transition! But in order to _figure out_ what the correct decisions are—or what the best decisions are conditional on your axiomatic subjective values—we need to **get the theory right**.
305 Why not just say "cis" women? I do, often, depending on the audience and the context of what I'm trying to say. I can [code-switch](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/10/code-switching-i/); I can entertain multiple frames—different maps that reflect different aspects of the same territory. I can even be polite, when being polite is _cheap_. But it's important to at least _acknowledge_ that "cis" and "actual" do not _convey the same meaning_. (Sufficiently advanced neuroscience would be able to confirm this by examining patterns of brain activity on hearing each word.) The _fact_ that they don't convey the same meaning is _why_ the latter is offensive—the source of controversy isn't that people love words that start with _c_ and hate words that that start with a vowel sound. Not being allowed to use the word "actual" in this context makes it harder to encode the _empirical hypothesis_ I'm trying to communicate, that "trans" isn't just pointing to a subcluster within the "woman" cluster (like "young woman" or "Japanese woman"), it's actually denoting a subcluster within the _male_ cluster in the subspace of dimensions corresponding to [developmental sex](http://unremediatedgender.space/2019/Sep/terminology-proposal-developmental-sex/)-related traits that—unfortunately, heartbreakingly—we don't know how to change with current technology.
307 The fact that I can't _talk about the world I see_ in the simple language that comes naturally to me without it inevitably being construed as a reactionary political statement is a _problem_. And it's a _rationality_ problem insofar as the world I see is potentially a more accurate model of the real world, than the world I'm allowed to talk about in Berkeley 2020.
309 If we _actually had_ the magical perfect sex change technology described in "Changing Emotions", no one would even be _tempted_ to invent these clever category-gerrymandering mind games! People who wanted to change sex would just _do it_, and everyone would use corresponding language (pronouns and more) because it straightforwardly _described reality_—not as a political favor, or because of some exceedingly clever philosophy argument, but using the _same_ ordinary word-choice algorithms that they used for everything else.
311 I definitely don't want to call (say) my friend "Irene" a man. That would be crazy! Because **her transition _actually worked_.** Because it actually worked _on the merits_. _Not_ because I'm _redefining concepts in order to be nice to her_. When I look at her, whatever algorithm my brain _ordinarily_ uses to sort people into "woman"/"man"/"not sure" buckets, returns "woman."
315 Perhaps so. But back in 2009, **we did not anticipate that _whether or not I should cut my dick off_ would _become_ a politicized issue.**
317 **To be fair, it's not obvious that I _shouldn't_ cut my dick off!**
319 I don't think I'm setting [my price for joining](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Q8evewZW5SeidLdbA/your-price-for-joining) particularly high here?
321 [cruelty to ordinary people, optimized to confuse and intimidate people trying to use language to reason about the concept of biological sex]
323 https://medium.com/@barrakerr/pronouns-are-rohypnol-dbcd1cb9c2d9
326 "You can't lift a ten-pound weight with one pound of force!"
327 https://equilibriabook.com/living-in-an-inadequate-world/
329 The debate never advances; Arthur Jensen on the Phil Donahue show
330 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtoqK1gsmHI
332 The Eliezer Yudkowsky I remember wrote about [how facts are tightly-woven together in the Great Web of Causality](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wyyfFfaRar2jEdeQK/entangled-truths-contagious-lies), such that [people who are trying to believe something false have an incentive to invent and spread fake epistemology lessons](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTWkjCJScy2GFAgDt/dark-side-epistemology), and about the [high competence threshold that _forces_ correct conclusions](http://sl4.org/archive/0602/13903.html).
334 A culture where there are huge catastrophic consequences for [questioning religion](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/u6JzcFtPGiznFgDxP/excluding-the-supernatural), is a culture where it's harder to train alignment researchers that genuinely understand Occam's razor on a _deep_ level, when [the intelligent social web](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AqbWna2S85pFTsHH4/the-intelligent-social-web) around them will do anything to prevent them from applying the parsimony skill to the God hypothesis.
336 A culture where there are huge catastrophic consequences for questioning gender identity, is a culture where it's harder to train alignment researchers that genuinely understand the hidden-Bayesian-structure-of-language-and-cognition on a _deep_ level, when the social web around them will do anything to prevent them from [invalidating someone's identity](http://unremediatedgender.space/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/).
340 The real alignment-theory lesson is about :
341 [TODO: the point it about unforeseen maximum, and for the purposes of a dramatic story, it's OK to focus on the big separating hyperplane, even if there are many other hyperplanes]
342 [TODO: "Interpersonal Entanglement" suggests a negotiation]
346 [evolution didn't design women and men to be optimal partners for each other](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Py3uGnncqXuEfPtQp/interpersonal-entanglement),
349 (Though I think I'd call myself a transwoman—one word, for the same reason the _verthandi_ in "Failed Utopia #4-2" got their own word. I currently write "trans woman", two words, as a strategic concession to the shibboleth-detectors of my target audience: I don't want to to _prematurely_ scare off progressive-socialized readers on account of mere orthography, when what I actually have to say is already disturbing enough.)
352 Someone asked me: "Wouldn't it be embarrassing if the community solved Friendly AI and went down in history as the people who created Utopia forever, and you had rejected it because of gender stuff?"
354 But the _reason_ it seemed _at all_ remotely plausible that our little robot cult could be pivotal in creating Utopia forever was _not_ "[Because we're us](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/effective-altruism-is-self-recommending/), the world-saving good guys", but rather _because_ we were going to discover and refine the methods of _systematically correct reasoning_.
356 If you're doing systematically correct reasoning, you should be able to get the right answer even when the question _doesn't matter_. Obviously, the safety of the world does not _directly_ depend on being able to think clearly about trans issues. Similarly, the safety of a coal mine for humans does not _directly_ depend on [whether it's safe for canaries](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/canary_in_a_coal_mine): the dead canaries are just _evidence about_ properties of the mine relevant to human health. (The causal graph is the fork "canary-death ← mine-gas → human-danger" rather than the direct link "canary-death → human-danger".)
358 The "discourse algorithm" (the collective generalization of "cognitive algorithm") that can't just _get this shit right_ in 2020 (because being out of step with the reigning Bay Area ideological fashion is deemed too expensive by a consequentialism that counts unpopularity as a cost), also can't get heliocentrism right in 1632 _for the same reason_—and I really doubt it can get AI alignment theory right in 2039.
360 If the people _marketing themselves_ as the good guys who are going to save the world using systematically correct reasoning are _not actually interested in doing systematically correct reasoning_ (because systematically correct reasoning leads to two or three conclusions that are politically "impossible" to state clearly in public, and no one has the guts to [_not_ shut up and thereby do the politically impossible](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nCvvhFBaayaXyuBiD/shut-up-and-do-the-impossible)), that's arguably _worse_ than the situation where "the community" _qua_ community doesn't exist at all.
362 Someone asked me: "If we randomized half the people at [OpenAI](https://openai.com/) to use trans pronouns one way, and the other half to use it the other way, do you think they would end up with significantly different productivity?"
364 But the thing I'm objecting to is a lot more fundamental than the specific choice of pronoun convention, which obviously isn't going to be uniquely determined. Turkish doesn't have gender pronouns, and that's fine. Naval ships traditionally take feminine pronouns in English. [Many other languages are much more gendered than English](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender#Distribution_of_gender_in_the_world's_languages), where pretty much only third-person singular pronouns are at issue. The convention used in one's native language probably _does_ [color one's thinking to some extent](TODO: "Crossing the Line" link),
366 The thing I'm objecting to is this culture of _narcissistic Orwellian mind games_ that thinks people have the right to _dictate other people's model of reality_.
368 [TODO: We want words that map onto the structure of things in the word: if everyone were a hermaphrodite]
370 [TODO: Anton on "be a lesbian by behavior alone"; contrast to coining "transbian" as a new word: https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/where-have-all-the-lesbians-gone-0a7 ]
372 [TODO: it was a complement! I don't _want_ people to have to doublethink around their perceptions of me, pretend not to notice]
374 On the question of how this affects the productivity of AI researchers, I think looking at [our standard punching bag of theism](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dLL6yzZ3WKn8KaSC3/the-uniquely-awful-example-of-theism) is a very fair comparison. Religious people aren't _stupid_. You can prove theorems about the properties of [Q-learning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q-learning) or [Kalman filters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalman_filter) at a world-class level without encountering anything that forces you to question whether Jesus Christ died for our sins.
376 [TODO: it's actually the same rationality skill of parsimony]
380 https://www.nickbostrom.com/evolution.pdf
384 One man willing to make an extraordinary effort
386 You've got to ask yourself one question.
388 Just _how dumb_ do you think we are? [_Defect!_](/2017/Sep/grim-trigger-or-the-parable-of-the-honest-man-and-the-god-of-marketing/)
394 Stereotypically, heterosexual marriages tend not to last when the AGP husband's eggshell cracks.
397 In "Interpersonal Entanglement", Yudkowsky had speculated that gay couples might have better relationships, since they don't have to deal with the mismatch.
399 Stereotypically, AGP-taxon trans women have a tendency to pair up with each other.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blob